


Richie Tozier Is [Fill in the Blank]

by pineapplecrushface



Series: After Derry [4]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Homophobic Language, Interviews, Journalism, M/M, references to Maine crime statistics, the Losers Club of 1989 gets to be happy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:02:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21952642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pineapplecrushface/pseuds/pineapplecrushface
Summary: Writing an article about Richie Tozier comes with a long list of instructions, warnings, notes, and in one instance, a text that says onlyPlease remind him that if he doesn’t give me back my Nintendo Switch, I’m posting that picture on Twitter. He knows the one.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Series: After Derry [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1513157
Comments: 55
Kudos: 1150





	Richie Tozier Is [Fill in the Blank]

**Richie Tozier Is [Fill in the Blank]**

**In January's cover story, Richie Tozier gets cryptic about wedding attire, murder, small-town homophobia, and cats.**

Writing an article about Richie Tozier comes with a long list of instructions, warnings, notes, and in one instance, a text that says only _Please remind him that if he doesn’t give me back my Nintendo Switch, I’m posting that picture on Twitter. He knows the one_.

It’s a lot to take in. Everybody I speak with is exasperated by him. Everybody I speak with loves him. Everybody I speak with has a different story about how he took them out for the weirdest night of their life.

Over time, I formulate my own list, which is neither comprehensive nor entirely accurate, although Tozier looks it over and agrees with each item.

**1\. Richie Tozier is extremely annoying**

It’s one of the first things he’ll tell you about himself, just as a general statement of fact.

“Sorry,” he says when he opens the door to his lower Manhattan loft. “I’m really wired, so I’m probably gonna be more annoying than usual. Just a heads up.”

Annoying is one of the kinder adjectives both fans and detractors apply to him. “Like a nauseating mixture of microwaved nachos and cocaine that leaves you feeling ashamed for wanting more, both from yourself and from him, as a human being,” is how _Esquire_ described Tozier’s 2011 _Trashmouth_ tour. It is strange to realize that I, the author of that piece, was going for a compliment, but it’s a mark of the affection the industry holds for him that everyone seems to have known the truth all along: Tozier, who is riveting onstage, has always been better than his material. 

Until recently, that is. Of all the surprises Richie Tozier has offered up—coming out onstage during his first show since the bizarre, off-script crash-and-burn in 2016 that prompted rumors of a drug-fueled breakdown; revealing that he’s been friends with horror author William Denbrough, architect Ben Hanscom, and fashion designer Beverly Marsh since childhood, and that the four of them grew up in the unsung crime capital of the US, where they were routinely tormented by a serial killer—the fact that he is a talented writer and comedian rates pretty low for shock value, but the response has been an overwhelming wave of support.

“More than I deserve, I think, is the consensus,” he says. “It’s like, everybody knows I was a fucking dumbass, but they’re willing to let bygones be bygones as long as I never say the words _pussy vomit_ ever again.”

He did, in fact, shout the words pussy vomit, among several of his other greatest hits, at the beginning of his sold-out comeback show at the Capitol Theatre, which was recorded and turned into his first Netflix special, _Yes Homo_. The audience, repeating each jubilant phrase (“Upskirt videos! Pearl glasses! That time I accidentally uploaded my colonoscopy to Pornhub!”), was still laughing when he cut them off like a maestro and said, “The thing is, I’ve never actually had sex with a woman,” and took them on a frenetic journey through seven very different situations in his life in which he discovered he did not, in fact, want to have sex with women, because he wanted to have sex with men. It was hilarious, it was strange, it was a little disgusting, and most of all, it was what we never knew we always wanted from Rich Tozier. 

He’s been uncharacteristically close-mouthed about the entire endeavor, but seems ready to discuss it now that the show’s run has been over for a few months. “That’s all anybody wants to know. ‘How did it feel? What made you want to do it like that? Why not just send out a press release and pretend you’re not a relentless attention whore?’” He’s more jittery in person than onstage, where his energy goes out into the crowd. Here, in his home, his hands are constantly drumming on his legs, running through his hair, snapping and pointing and emphasizing, as he considers his next words. “It felt—amazing. I was more afraid, almost, than I’ve ever been. But I’ve seen some shit that would turn Trump’s hair plugs white. The fear just made it _more_. I used to get sick when I thought about anyone finding out, but this was the opposite of whatever that was. I knew when I was done with the first show that even if they hated it, even if they hated _me_ , I was doing something I was supposed to be doing.”

“And you’re a fucking _relentless_ attention whore,” Eddie Kaspbrak adds.

Tozier smiles with his entire body, sharing his delight at Kaspbrak’s brilliance with me. “I am,” he admits, like this is new information.

**2\. Richie Tozier is really, really, really married**

I’m advised, early in the interview process, that engaging in Tozier’s and Kaspbrak’s complex mating rituals is a fool’s errand.

“If they start fighting,” Ben Hanscom advises, “you distract one of them by insulting the other. Then they’ll either join in or both of them will attack you. It’s over faster that way.”

“Ah,” says Beverly Marsh when I relate this to her. “Classic Hanscom maneuver. He prefers to fall on the grenade. It works, but we always end up being asked to leave by the manager. If you want them to shut up, you find something they both really like or both really hate and get them started on that.”

What do they both really like?

“Each other,” she says slyly. “Ask them about their wedding.”

This is how I learn that Richie Tozier and Eddie Kaspbrak are married.

“Oh, that beautiful traitor,” Tozier says admiringly, although I refuse to divulge my source. “I know it was Bev. She’s the only one who isn’t afraid of either of us.”

“No one is afraid of you, dude,” Kaspbrak says. He sits at the kitchen table with his laptop during most of the interview, but interjects whenever he feels Tozier’s version of events is incorrect. He also responds, without raising his head, to any and all of Tozier’s questions, which are frequent and range from “Babe, what’s that disease you thought you had in college before you found out it started in the ovaries?” (Anti-NDMA receptor encephalitis) to “Where’s my blue sweater?” (Kaspbrak is wearing it) to “Aw, Eds, are you wearing it because it smells like me?” (Yes, and he is not giving it back).

“We got engaged in January and just decided to go for it the next time all our friends could get together again. That turned out to be last weekend, after Bev’s show—which, now that I’m thinking about it, is probably why she snitched. We totally stole her thunder.”

“She’s the one who got us to the courthouse. Barely on time, I might add,” Kaspbrak says.

“Because someone, not naming names that rhyme with Shmedward or anything, decided to iron his suit like seven times because he couldn’t get the fucking crease in one of the legs right,” Tozier says.

“Excuse me for not wanting to look like the five-day-old corpse of Jimmy Buffet at my own fucking wedding,” Kaspbrak snaps, and suddenly I’m in the middle of a CNN panel. They yell over each other at a speed and pitch usually reserved for sports announcers, and I realize I have been played by Beverly Marsh.

“If someone tells you, 'Dude, I’d marry you even if you were wearing flip-flops and your ugliest tank top,' don’t you think you’re fucking honor-bound to wear those things?” Tozier finally asks me.

Kaspbrak, not to be outdone, whips his head toward me. “Don’t you think you shouldn’t take advantage of what was obviously a romantic gesture made in the heat of the fucking moment?” 

I search my inner Ben Hanscom and try to figure out which grenade to fall on. “I feel like you had to know what you were getting into,” I tell Kaspbrak, which seems like the right decision for two seconds.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Kaspbrak hisses. He has dark, furious eyes and eyebrows that get darker and more furious until he seems to be made entirely of pupil and outrage. “Just because he spent forty years looking like the floor of a frat house the morning after a kegger, he’s exempt from formal situations for life?”

“What the fuck ever, dude,” Tozier says scornfully. “I changed when we got to the courthouse. You’re wearing my fucking wedding sweater right now.”

Kaspbrak sits back in his chair and grins. “I know,” he says. “You looked really nice.” And the frenzy is over for the moment. I, a Midwesterner with a pathological aversion to confrontation, am sweaty and shaken; they look as relaxed as cats who have broken a shelf’s worth of figurines and successfully blamed it on the dog. 

The two met as children in the aforementioned secret crime capital, Derry, Maine, along with Marsh, Denbrough, Hanscom, travel writer Mike Hanlon, and accountant Stanley Uris, whose death reunited them in 2016. Neither of them were out to anyone; Kaspbrak was married to a woman at the time, and Tozier, in his own words, “never even had a full one-night stand. Two hours, tops.” The rest of the Losers Club, as they call themselves, always understood there was something special about their relationship (“They were so annoying,” Denbrough says. “We loved them, but oh my god, man.”), but the two didn’t become romantically involved until after Kaspbrak’s separation.

“Yeah, surprisingly, it took me a few months to realize I wanted to hear his shitty Queen Elizabeth impression every single fucking day,” Kaspbrak says drily.

“Not me,” Tozier says. “The second I saw him again I was like, ‘Fuck, how did I forget I was in love with this little rage stroke waiting to happen?’ So I got super drunk and talked about fucking his mom for like three hours.”

That begs the question, of course: how _did_ he forget him?

“Intergalactic magic,” Tozier says, shrugging. “I don’t know. Don’t ask me how it works.”

Later, Tozier gets up to put some glasses in the sink. He walks behind Kaspbrak and puts a hand on his shoulder, and Kaspbrak stretches and rests his head against Tozier’s arm, murmuring, “Babe, did you drink that entire pot of coffee?”

“Yeah, I’m like, _vibrating_ ,” Tozier says.

“It’s so unfair that you can do that and not shit your brains out for days afterward,” Kaspbrak says.

“I know,” Tozier says. “I should donate to that poop transplant thing.”

“Smart,” Kaspbrak says, smiling up at him. “Then you can be stuck up other people’s asses instead of your own all the time.”

**3\. Richie Tozier is not going on your true crime podcast**

Derry is still a touchy subject. It takes me a while to realize all the restless energy ceased as soon as we began talking about his hometown. Tozier goes still and looks wary.

Some relevant facts: Maine, on average, sees about 25 murders per year. In 2016, there were 24. Three of those were Juniper Hill Asylum security guards killed by Henry Bowers. In 1989, there were 47 deaths classified as homicides in Maine. Bowers, who was 17 at the time, took credit for eight of those, as well as six from 1988, for a total of 13 children and his own father, policeman Oscar “Butch” Bowers. Numerous true crime shows and podcasts have covered the Derry murders—and the astonishing number of missing children in Derry in 2015-16, 1988-89, and even further back, in 1961-63, indicating that perhaps more than one killer may have been at work in Derry during those years.

Further relevant facts: one of the children murdered in 1988 was George Denbrough, William Denbrough’s six-year-old brother. Bowers, along with several of his friends, spent years bullying each member of the Losers Club, and when he escaped from Juniper Hill, his first act was to stab Eddie Kaspbrak in the face before tracking down Mike Hanlon and attempting to kill him. Bowers was killed during the attack, and children stopped disappearing from Derry once again.

“Yes,” Tozier says. “Those are all things that happened, but everybody forgets that Eddie pulled the knife out of his face like a fucking badass and stabbed Bowers back.”

“I had no idea what I was even doing,” Kaspbrak says. “For the record.”

“That’s even cooler. It was just, like, _instinct_.” Tozier’s face is full of admiration and affection for a moment before he adds, “But yeah, it was legitimately traumatic. Just trying to fucking film _The_ _Big Chill Part 2: Electric Boogaloo_ and the Ghost of Mullets Past shows up in a hotel bathroom.”

Would any of the Losers Club consider being a guest on a true crime show or podcast?

“No,” Tozier says immediately. “Uh, this is a little embarrassing, but we reached out to them and requested that they never contact us or our families. All the podcasters were cool, but this one History Channel producer kept bothering our friend’s wife, so we had to threaten legal action. I felt like a dick, because I get why people want to know, but like, talk to people who want to talk about it. We don’t.”

Even further relevant facts: the reunion that brought Tozier, Kaspbrak, Denbrough, Marsh, and Hanscom back to Derry along with Hanlon occurred only days after Adrian Mellon’s murder, a hate crime that shook the LGBTQ community but hardly seems to have affected Derry at all.

“You know, not a single person has asked me why it took me so long to come out,” he says, chewing on his thumb. “I feel like it’s a pretty rude question in general, but people ask me all kinds of weird shit about my sex life, so I don’t think it’s etiquette that’s stopping them. It’s just obvious, man. We grew up in _that_ town, during the AIDS crisis. If I had a nickel for every hick in a snowmobile suit who said they wanted to kill queers, I’d have had enough money to get a fucking bus out of there. It was bad, and I was bad at pretending to be straight. Probably the only person I fooled was Eddie.”

“I was an extremely late bloomer,” Kaspbrak interjects.

“Yeah, corpse flowers bloom faster than you did, babe,” Tozier says.

I expect them to start squabbling again, but Kaspbrak lets that slide. Or perhaps he just knows how difficult it is for Tozier to talk about it. “I didn’t have to go through what you did,” he says, to which Tozier replies, obliquely, “It was there for you too, just buried under all that shit with the leper.”

"I guess," Kaspbrak says. He gets up abruptly and searches through a kitchen drawer, pulling out something that makes Tozier straighten, looking concerned, but Kaspbrak waves him on.

“It felt like a death sentence,” Tozier says once Kaspbrak sits down again, and pauses, wrinkling his nose. “That’s so dramatic. We were already always on the verge of getting murdered. I don’t know why one more thing on top of the others was such a drag. I was a dorky little loser, but at least I had my friends and my family. If I told them I was gay? Best case scenario, they would hate me. Worst case scenario, they’d want me dead too. I had empirical evidence to back me up. So like, for anyone who wants to know, that’s the Derry experience. Lots of ways to disappear.”

That’s too much for a kid to deal with. 

“It sucked ass,” he says. “But we lived. We made it out of there, and we fucking killed it.”

“Yes, we did,” Kaspbrak says, soft but intense. The two give each other a look that feels like an oath, and I simultaneously understand too much and yet not enough about their relationship. It isn’t only theirs; the relationships between all the Losers are like this, I learn. They mess with each other nonstop, know each other better than family despite an unexplained twenty-five year gap, and casually refer to blood pacts, murdered siblings and classmates and friends, stabbing and being stabbed, and summers spent playing in the Derry sewer system.

“Fuck, I need a shot after that,” Tozier says. “Eds, you want one?”

To my astonishment, Kaspbrak gets up and brings three shot glasses to the living room. It’s two in the afternoon, but that doesn’t seem to matter in this household. Kaspbrak reaches for Tozier’s hand and they hold on tight without looking at each other, and we toast to the Losers Club of 1989 with the best whisky I’ve ever tasted.

**4\. Richie Tozier is a big comedy nerd**

“He wanted to be a ventriloquist when we were younger,” Kaspbrak says while Tozier is in the bathroom. “Like, he grows up in the creepiest fucking town in America and decides he’s gonna get the fuck out there and make it creepier. Thankfully, dolls freaked him out too much, but then he got into magic. That was a rough time for all of us.”

I have to know: what was Rich Tozier like as a child? The mind boggles.

“Worse. Five million times worse,” Kaspbrak says thoughtfully. “But not bad, not really. He’s just so fucking smart. He was that little asshole who everybody knew should have skipped a couple of grades, but the high school teachers were like ‘No, no fucking way, maybe he’ll calm down by the time he gets to us.’ He needed to channel it into something or he was gonna blow up, and rural Maine in the '80s didn’t exactly provide an outlet. Now he has outlets. And Adderall. If we’d had ADHD meds back then life would have been a lot easier for everyone.”

Was he always funny?

“Not a day in his fucking life.” Kaspbrak has a mean deadpan, but he smiles right away, although he rolls his eyes a little. “This is gonna come back to bite me in the ass, but he makes me laugh more than anybody or anything. I went for years thinking I didn’t even like comedy, and then this asshole shows up again and I laugh, like, _all the time_.”

Do you make him laugh?

“Yeah, but you know that’s not exactly hard, right?”

“What’s not hard?” Tozier asks, coming back into the living room.

“You,” Kaspbrak says. “You’re soft as shit, Trashmouth.”

His husband might know him best and has surely known him the longest, but his fellow comedians would disagree on that point. Tozier has one of the more identifiable laughs in Hollywood, an uncontrollable, nasal cackle, but he wasn’t always very free with it.

“No, Rich could come up with shit off the top of his head like nobody else, and he could recognize when something had the potential to be funny—you could see him zeroing right in on it like a laser—but I don’t remember him really laughing,” says Jamie Ketterland, who met him in 1997 when they were both doing Laugh Boston, and later joined him at the Groundlings School in Los Angeles. “I wasn’t surprised by how good the new show was, but I was surprised by what a good time he seemed to be having. He always had a _wild_ time, back in the day, but he wasn't enjoying himself, I can tell you that.”

“He cultivated this image, your average American fuckboy, like he just rolled out of bed, snorted a line, stumbled onto a stage, someone handed him a mic and ba-da-bing, he fell upward into a comedy career, but that's simply not what happened,” says Robin Perry, another Groundlings member. “He was a Bergson freak, Bergson and Beckett and Raskin. It made me crazy. I can’t remember a drink order and he could rattle off a paragraph about semantic expectation verbatim. But you can see it in action. He knows exactly how to get you there even when he’s doing a bit about taco shits. A lot of that is talent, but most of it is that he just ate it all up, nonstop, never slept. I can't say he laughed very much. It seemed to me he had a lot going on, but we usually left each other alone unless somebody started getting flaky, and he never did.”

With all that and a knack for impersonations—a skill, his friends assure me, that was very much not in evidence in his youth—he is frequently asked why he was never on _Saturday Night Live_. “Actually, people always assume I was,” he says. “And when I say no, they’re like, ‘Oh, right, _MADtv_.’ One time a dude said he loved me on _NewsRadio_ , and I was like, ‘Does this guy think I’m Andy Dick?’” He never auditioned for _SNL_ , though he hosted last year. “I don’t know, it never seemed right, for some reason,” he says. “Which sounds like fucking nonsense, like, you’d be stupid not to give up a testicle to go on _SNL_ , but I always had a head for when it was the right time to do something, and there was never a right time with them.”

Has he ever thought about writing for _SNL_? “I’m way too old for that,” he says. “Like, not that I’m out of touch, which I _am_ , but the pace they work at? I’d fucking die. No, I’m happy writing my own shit, and doing voice work because it freaks him out.” He points a thumb at Kaspbrak.

“It gives me serious fucking cognitive dissonance to see a cute baby animal and then hear your voice coming out of it,” Kaspbrak snaps, and Tozier turns his hand until his thumb is pointing up, his face bright. Objective achieved.

**5\. Richie Tozier is doing okay**

“Life is fucking _good_ ,” he says. If he sounds surprised, it’s because he is. “I was lowkey depressed for like, twenty-five years. Everything seemed fine, but the kind of fine where you look back on it and you were actually dead the whole time.”

It’s obvious that whatever was making him miserable has been lifted—at the very least, he isn’t in an M. Night Shyamalan movie, and despite the mid-day whisky, the Rich Tozier who was drunk for what he estimates is most of 2005 is long gone—although it isn’t completely over.

“Too much has happened for me to feel like we’re out of the black forever,” he says. “The rug can be pulled out any time, right? But it’s good now. I’m gonna let it be good and not worry about the rug…but I’m not taking my eyes off it all the way either, you know?”

**6\. Richie Tozier is bad at taking compliments (but great at fart noises)**

“He’s saved my life, a few times now,” Mike Hanlon tells me, in the same offhand fashion they all adopt when discussing life or death situations upon which they refuse to elaborate. “He’d do anything for his friends, no matter what, but I don’t think he knows the feeling’s mutual. I think he thinks he owes us for putting up with him or something. He’s coming around, though. I mean, Eddie married him, so we’re pretty sure he’s accepted that at least one of us likes him. The rest of us are always trying to figure out how to tell him we love him without getting drowned out by fart noises.”

“Aw,” Tozier says when I relay this to him. He restrains himself to one fart noise. “Those are strong words coming from a dude who blocked me from the group chat the other day.”

“You deserved it. You said you were gonna sign him up for a sex cruise,” Kaspbrak says.

“Eds, it was a Senior Bahamas Sea Adventure. What he does on it is none of my business,” Tozier says. “Anyway, that’s not his Christmas present.”

Warily, I ask what it is.

“This isn’t coming out until after Christmas, right? Cool. He thinks none of us can make it for the holidays this year, but we’re actually kidnapping him and dragging him to Corsica. He told me last year he’s always wanted to go there, probably for the history nerd shit.”

That’s an amazing present, I tell him.

“He deserves more than that,” Tozier says. “I’m also getting him a fleshlight. I was single for like, life. I know what he needs.”

“Beep-fucking-beep, asshole,” Kaspbrak shouts from the bathroom.

“I knew you could still hear everything from in there, you fucking liar,” Tozier calls back. “He has ears like a sheep dog, but all of a sudden he’s all, ‘No, dickface, I couldn’t hear anything you said about my Christmas presents, I was in the bathroom.’”

Which brings us to:

**7\. Richie Tozier is not getting Eddie Kaspbrak a cat**

“He thinks I’m getting him a cat,” Tozier mouths, scrunching his face up in disbelief. He twirls his finger to indicate the space we’re sitting in. “I bought the apartment.”

The loft was owned by a friend of a friend who relocated to London. They’ve been renting it for several years with the understanding that it was a temporary situation, but Tozier, by his own reckoning, is extremely persuasive.

“We love this place,” he says. “But it’s really special for Eddie. He doesn’t want to leave. And now I can install a giant hammock. Win-win.”

Two weeks after Christmas, Tozier posts a picture on Twitter. He and Kaspbrak, who are sunburned and suntanned, respectively, are holding a large, confused tuxedo cat. The caption reads, “John McClane Kevin Bacon in Footloose, you are named after the two bravest men I ever knew.” The cat’s real name, he reveals several tweets later, is Bill S. Preston, Esq. There is no word yet on whether a Ted (Theodore) Logan will be joining the household.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm [here](https://pineapplecrushface.tumblr.com/) on tumblr, continually sinking farther into my feelings.


End file.
